Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photo"We will not cross that line and get onto the slippery slope — the professionalization of college football and a furthering of the arms race. We simply have to say no." — E. Gordon Gee, Ohio State president

Opponents dug in against playoff -

Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee calls the issue of a college football playoff his Maginot
Line -- a final, heels-in-the-dirt resistance to what he views as the ruination of the sport.

The reference is to the line of fortifications France built on its border with Germany in the
1930s.

"We will not cross that line and get onto the slippery slope -- the professional-ization of
college football and a furthering of the arms race," he said. "We simply have to say no. If we
don't say no to this, the horse has left the barn totally. I will vote against it under any
circumstance."

If people get upset with Gee for that, he is only vocalizing the dominant opinion of those
within the system. It's not just one man who is opposed to a playoff: It's almost everyone
associated with the game, from his fellow presidents on down to coaches, athletic directors and
conference commissioners.

Last week, Bowl Championship Series commissioners breezily dismissed a four-team playoff
proposal almost before it was proposed.

It sounds hard-hearted for Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany to say the pressure for a playoff
system is coming only from "external forces."

In this case, "external forces" represent the millions of fans who pine for a more definitive
way of deciding the nation's best team.

But after listening to Delany, Gee, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith and OSU football
coach Jim Tressel, it's clear a playoff system is not going to happen any time soon. The vast
majority of people who run college football like the way it's working. They like the bowl revenue,
they like the television revenue and they like the pageantry and tradition. They don't buy the
notion that there is a crying need for an overhaul.

In their view, things are humming along smoothly.

Not only are the movers and shakers not looking to dismantle the bowl system, they added two
bowls the other day. Last year, 1.6 million people attended bowl games, and conferences and bowl
teams split $222 million.

Add that up, and it equals zero momentum for a playoff.

"I just can't think of anything that jumps out at me that says, 'Well, you
have to do this,' " Tressel said of going to a playoff. "I don't know what that
is. And there's a whole boatload of things about it that you can say, 'I don't know if you
can do this.' "

In some ways, Ohio State is a perfect microcosm of why playoffs remain a pipe dream. As one of
the biggest and richest athletic departments, it would stand to gain a lot by the influx of
additional money that certainly would come from a playoff system. OSU officials, therefore, should
be in favor of it.

And as Tressel pointed out, he has no reason to oppose a playoff on philosophical grounds,
having won four national championships in a best-of-16 playoff system at Youngstown State.

"I wouldn't be (at OSU) today if it weren't for playoffs," he said.

Gee has proved he's not afraid to be a maverick, to blow up a system he views as broken. Look at
his radical restructuring of the athletic department when he was chancellor at Vanderbilt.

So a case can be made that Tressel and Gee might be more open than most to the playoff
possibilities.

Instead, they shoot down the idea, for the following reasons:

Adding more games is bad for the players' welfare, particularly those who plan to try their
hand at pro football.

Shortening the regular season to make room for playoff games in December won't work, because
schools need all the home-game revenue they can get.

You can't ask fans to travel to neutral-site playoff games two or three weeks in a row.

If you have home-site playoff hosts, you crush the bowl system. And bowls are worth
preserving.

"The bowls are around the holidays," Tressel said, "and the communities and the travel and the
tourism, and the 6-5 team that finally got bowl eligible. . . . "

And that leads to the final reason for the opposition to a playoff system, perhaps the one most
galling to fans:

They don't see the necessity to clear up the "Who's really the best team?" debate that seems to
pop up annually.

"I don't buy this notion of a 'winner take all' mentality," Gee said. "I'm very old fashioned,
I'd rather go back to the old bowl system we had. It was lovely."

Tressel said he heard a radio talk-show host recently say the world has changed, and the only
thing that's important is being No. 1.

"I don't know if I want to add to that change, because I don't know that that's a healthy
change," Tressel said.

In the bowl system, outside of the title game there are 31 (soon to be 33) winners. Four of
those are winners of BCS bowls. Those all are worthy outcomes to a season, in Tressel's view.

Maybe Gee's Maginot Line reference offers some hope to playoff proponents: The Germans
outflanked it, and France fell in six weeks.